aakashd

A quick note before the entry: I did this because it was my first month off from school+work for a full month and wanted to do something fun that was anti-MBA. So, it was more of an experiment than anything else. Plus, beards are super awesome and deserve to be grown. I apologize for the lack of pictures.

A noticeable length was beginning to form with each strand and the “beard” was beginning to create it’s own little personality. What resulted was a number of quizzical, but pleasant looks from people checking out the “beard” for the first time. It was beginning to get rather itchy especially in 90 degree weather, but it wasn’t as bad as what other bearded and ex-bearded folk explained from their experiences. The one definite logistical positive out of this was not having to spend the time every other day in shaving my facial hair.

At this point, I had a couple of new things to think about that I never had to deal with before: hair growing over the lip, growing in ways that I didn’t expect and what was I going to do when I get one of those “3 on the top and 2 on the sides” haircuts I usually get?

The hairs got in the way while I ate or drank anything if I didn’t trim every other day, so that was a definite priority. This turned into a lot more work than I’m usually accustomed to. Even when I started doing small changes on one part of the beard, I felt the need to take care of the entire beard. An estimated time of 5 minutes ended up taking 15 minutes due to the nature of how my hair grows not only on top of my lips, but also around the jawline and on the neck. It just got kinda nasty after a day or two for that last week.

Past that, the human interaction aspects of how it affected my life started creeping in once it got filled out. It was more than often, the terrorist label came up between friends and family and people in general gave these deer-in-the-headlight stares until they heard me speak to them. It was a bit odd, but certainly not disheartening. Nevertheless, there was this major change in perception of my personality from people, who were at least acquaintances, based on something as arbitrary as facial hair.

In retrospect, my little experiment proved to me that perception continues to be a funny thing. It has a huge part in how we define the way we perform actions in our personal worlds and how others define the way they not only react to our actions, but also supplant those actions with their own personal world. In effect, they create a perception based on something that’s not completely fair, but very natural to the human psyche.

In the end, I’d still love to do it again, but only when I’m in a phase of my life that allows me to do such things with ease.

Mozilla now has a new WebDevQA Emporer, Stephen Donner! This coronation is meant to be a celebration for the amazing growth in his WebDev QA Kingdom over the past 4 months. He’s gone from a single knight vanquishing bugs at a remarkable pace to bringing in six more valiant helpers in his quest to provide quality across all of Mozilla’s webpages! So, here we are. Let’s all help and bring forth the era of the WebDevQA Emporer!

As with any great Emporer, he needs an equally talented Empress. In this case, there was no one better suited than our very own Samuel Sidler! The service was held on Thursday, August 20, at 3pm. For a video of the event, check out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyWnxuOlYVc

I want to thank Raymond “Ray-Ray” Etornam for being the ebb to my flow on this little project, Brandon Sterne for taking video of the coronation and uploading it to Youtube and everyone else involved on getting this done.

What we’ve done so far over the past 3 months:
- 2,636 manual test cases run via litmus
- 150 Bugs created spanning multiple Mozilla related projects
- 8 MozMill Testscripts created
- 15 Website Test Reports collected
- An average of 39.3 Testday participants on IRC partaking in the day’s activities

I’m pretty proud of the work that’s been done so far by the Mozilla QA Community since we re-started Testdays on a bi-monthly basis. That’s a lot of results over a time when we were still trying to figure out how to use Testdays in the best way possible and squeeze the amount of participation with what we had at the time.

Of course, it’s still in its infancy as a lot of infrastructure is still in need of being built up ( i.e. standard test guides, indexing participants and their contributions over individual as well as multiple Testdays, QMO work, creating a persistent Testday personality, etc. ) as well as finding a way to spread the word to people who really do need these events to hone their skills and/or learn new ones ( i.e. currently discouraged workers, students [high school and college], those who are just interested in web QA work, those interested in the advocation of the quality of the internet’s content, etc. ). A lot of it is already in the process of being done, so expect us to get a lot better and a lot more efficient in the coming months as we continue to drive this to wherever it may go.

With all of that said, what would you like to see out of Testdays that you haven’t seen already? I’d love to hear anything, especially comments and concerns, about what the Mozilla Community has seen so far and would like/like not to see again!

I recently attended the wedding of a family friend in which a number of conversations about Firefox-love-and-destroy-IE-completely came up. Now, at first I didn’t pay any attention to it as I thought it was just a form of congratulations on the new job, but looking back on it, the responses were more than that. A number of these people, many of whom I had seen only once or twice in my lifetime, raved on and on about it. The it they were talking about wasn’t the browser; it was the switch they had made. They were given the opportunity to choose their browser and make it better if they so wanted.

Now, this concept has been beaten half to death within the Mozilla community as well as those in the know about open source projects, but I don’t think the movement has fully scratched the surface of its potential to the rest of the world. You see, those wedding attendees weren’t just talking about a simple switch of their primary web browser. It was the fact that someone had built a system to give them the opportunity to make a change against a very inhumane state of affairs. They, nay, We wanted to be shown that something could be done to change the status quo…and it was. So, a little over 10 years later, where does it go from here? I have no idea, but I’d like to think that this is just the starting point.

There’s been a lot of new questions I’ve had to ask myself when its come to thinking of a way to change the workflow for the Mozilla QA team’s web portal, QMO. Namely, am I really doing this correctly? I mean this is the first time I’ve had to do anything of the sort, especially creating mock ups and work-flow diagrams.

With that said, it’s been incredibly fun and its something I really enjoy doing, but that in no way means that I’m any good at it… and that’s scary. Not because a lot of people are going to be seeing the results of this project, but because I care about the ideals of the company and want its culture and ways of doing things to be spread throughout the rest of the world. Unfortunately, to truly believe in that means to truly want the best results to be put out there. And to have the best results come out of this project means to have the most experienced and most creative people/team working on it. From that line of logic, well, we don’t want to mess this up by out-workflowing the workflow. Making the darn thing too simple might backfire and either force the user to think that there isn’t enough stuff that goes around here or get lost after starting their experience with MozQA.

Here, take the Get Involved Section for example:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Community/QMO_Discoverability/Get_Involved

It’s meant as a simple, easy-to-understand workflow that gets the user to be a part of the MozQA Community, but will it be obvious to the user? Is there too much information on the Get Involved page? Do I need a foxkeh or two? Now, multiply this over a couple sets of audiences and this smorgasbord of UX complexity just shouts its prominence from the rooftops.

Oh well, at least I’ll know how to use it.